


come to set a twisted thing straight

by dysprositos



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Self-Sacrifice, fearpocalypse, implied/referenced maiming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24262792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dysprositos/pseuds/dysprositos
Summary: There is an intruder standing in the chancel of Thomas Lukas's church.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	come to set a twisted thing straight

There is an intruder standing in the chancel of Thomas Lukas’s church.

He looks young, though older than Thomas was when he first found his way in the Forsaken—and Thomas was a late bloomer, so an adult by any reckoning. He has sandy brown hair, a clean and pressed suit as if attending an ordinary church in ordinary times, an incongruous backpack, and a nervous disposition. Thomas sits on the altar, chin in hand, ankle on knee, and watches the first visitor in months to neither pray nor seek to loot the church—the first visitor in months, since Thomas claimed the church as his territory—wring his hands and shift his weight from one foot to the other, darting his gaze from one entrance to the next.

“Waiting for someone?” Thomas suggests dryly, and the stranger turns and pales and drops to his knees. Ah. It’s like that, then. “I thought I made it clear,” he says thoughtfully, “that the One Alone does not need more disciples.”

The young man lifts his chin but not his gaze. “An offering,” he says, “for the—for the One Alone. From the village of B—, in gratitude.”

“Gratitude,” Thomas repeats.

The messenger clears his throat. “A young man of my village was sent out to get medicine. On his way back, he walked the winding path around the mountain, for the valley below was filled with darkness, and dwelt on the darkness inside his heart, for before he left to get the medicine he had once again ventured forth in love and once again been rejected.”

His eyes flick up, as if to gauge Thomas’s patience for the story. Certainly he has cousins who professed boredom at _yet another sob story of solitude_ , but he thinks even they would be intrigued by the promise of gratitude toward their patron. In any case, he has Thomas’s attention.

“The mist of the mountains licked at his ankles like a playful dog. He wondered if he would ever find love, or if love would ever find him, or if he was doomed to die unloved and alone. And as he wondered as he walked, the fog rose around him. It was not a natural fog.”

“The fog of the Forsaken,” Thomas murmurs. The storyteller looks startled at the interruption. It seems he’s become so immersed in his protagonist’s misery and heartache that he forgot there was a reason he was telling his tale while on his knees before an altar. When he resumes his story, his face is red to the tips of his ears.

“All thoughts of his loneliness fled, and most of the fog with it, when he took a turning in the path and saw that what lay ahead of him led directly into the same unnatural darkness that filled the valley below. Further ahead, the path led again out of it, but there was no way around and no other path and no one else with the medicine the villagers needed. And though the youth had had his heart broken there, again and again, he still had family there, and friends, he thought, and not even the people who had scorned him deserved the fate that the Crawling Rot would bring, if he did not return with the medicine and advice he’d been given. And so he walked into the sense-stealing darkness, one hand trailing the stone of the side of the mountain, like an Athenian youth sent below the palace of Minos with no princess’s favor and no magic ball of thread to guide him out, only his wits and his own study of the ways of mazes.

“And like Theseus’s fellow sacrifices, the youth knew that while losing his way could be the last thing he ever did, it was not the only danger this darkness held. For there dwelt in this valley of the shadow of death a horrible beast, with claws that could cut a man in half with a swipe, could cut another to the very bone with a mere graze. It was not for nothing that the path on the mountain, which had previously been clear of the darkness, was considered the only road to and from the village worth the risk of taking. As the young man ventured into the darkness, every sound around him, muffled as it was, was surely the claws or talons or hooves of the beast as it stalked him, and more than one he thought he felt hot breath on the back of his neck. _It’s toying with me,_ he thought, but such is the pain of a broken heart that he couldn’t help but think, _just like_ she _did... and before her,_ her, _and before her,_ him, _and..._ And in his bitterness, he fancied that the beast might catch him, might take him in its arms like no lover ever had, might give him the full consideration of predator to prospective dinner, and then spurn him like all those the youth had been caught by before.

“And with these thoughts, the fog returned, until he was walking not through horror-filled darkness deeper than night, but a fog so thick it was like wading through water to push through it, but push through he did, one hand still on the mountain. And in this manner he was saved from the beast, and came to his village, where he again remembered his family and friends whom he loved and who surely loved him in return, and the fog of the Forsaken relinquished its grip. He gave the village the medicine, and the advice, and drove out the Crawling Rot, and told them of the new danger in the path around the mountain, and his tale of how he had been saved from the beast that stalks the starless night by the haze that clings to those no one else will.”

Thomas concludes, “And so the village sent an offering, in gratitude.”

The young man nods. His hands clench and unclench repeatedly, adding wrinkles to his pressed black slacks just above the knees. “We took a vote, each ballot with a reason. And the votes were tallied, and the outcome chosen, and the reasons for those votes read out, and I was sent.” He looks up. His eyes are gray-blue and earnest. “It had to be done,” he says, and for some reason he sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as much as Thomas Lukas. “Debts must be repaid, and a debt was owed. And—if it were to lead to more of a relationship between us, and more protection for the community—” Thomas can’t help the curl of his lip in response to the word, and the young man drops his gaze and the suggestion, swallowing hard. “And so, an offering.”

The messenger makes no move to actually offer Thomas the offering, and so he prompts him: “What’s in your pack?”

Startlement again, though followed by confusion this time, rather than embarrassment, but he obediently takes the backpack off and opens it in front of him. “Several changes of clothing,” he says, and _there’s_ the blush, though Thomas doesn’t know why. The village in question is far enough from Thomas’s church for it to plausibly be more than one day’s trip of walking. He leaves the clothing in the backpack and pulls out a strip of cloth, wrapped around something else. “A blindfold, in case you decide you do not want me to look at you. A knife, in case you—in case you _really_ don’t want me to look at you. Or if you tire of my ‘ceaseless prattle’—but I also thought to pack a strong needle and thick black thread, if you wanted to solve that problem with a more mythological approach.”

And a more reversible one, Thomas works out, which may explain why the young man is looking up at him hopefully, but not why—“Oh. You didn’t come here to _bring_ me an offering. You _are_ the offering.”

A slow nod. “Yes. A sacrifice. Yours as... representative”—his voice lilts upward in question, but Thomas exercises his privilege as a Lukas and refuses to explain; when he isn’t corrected, the offering continues—“of the One Alone, to do with as you will. Whether that be to... feed on me, or kill me, or sacrifice me to your god”—he pauses again to allow a correction that doesn’t come—“to maim me, of course, or rape me, or simply make me do your bidding until I die.”

Thomas generously refrains from remarking on how many of those amount to the same thing. “You said they read the reasons out. Why did they vote to send you?”

“Ever since I was a child, they said I had the soul of a poet. That I could see through to the truth and speak it in a way no one else could.” His mouth twists in an approximation of a smile. “An attribute not high in demand, apparently, in a world where the sky sees down to the core of you if you let it. If it ever was.” The fog curls around him like a blanket as he swallows and studies the floor, and he makes no move to shrug it off. Thomas thinks he knows what his mother felt for his father all those years ago. “The same reason they sent me for the medicine. It seems I have no one to miss me after all.”

Thomas leans forward. “If no one in that entire village cares whether you live or die—as long as you don’t do it on their doorstep—why would you martyr yourself on their say-so? Why come here?”

The young man’s gray eyes meet Thomas’s through the fog that has filled the church, drawn by his despair. He is so, so alone, and Thomas, of course, hasn’t helped at all, has only made it harder to deny. Under the press of so much fog, Thomas can’t help but remember the last wedding he attended, the ever-present Moorland mist thickening around the couple to bear witness to their vows and insulate them from the rest of the world. He had been the best man, close enough to hear the traditional resignation in the new Lukas’s voice but not the words of his vow, and he hears the same hollow note in the young man’s voice when he finally responds. “Where else would I go?”


End file.
